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It's entirely possible for a highly intelligent person to follow a strategy that is completely fucking idiotic. Common, in fact.
How different is that from them writing a book about congestion pricing and you reading it? In both scenarios you are basically consuming the outputs of this author's mind.
Well, one difference is that, if you have a question about something the book hasn't specifically addressed in your reading thus far ("How does your theory apply to hotels used by the eclipse-watching crowds in 2017?"), in the first scenario you can just ask the author, but in the second case, after reading the relevant section of the book (and perhaps checking neighboring sections, the index, and the table of contents for any other relevant sections), the only way to answer your question is to think it out yourself. And that seems to be the outcome you want.
(One could reply that you'd be thinking, at least at first, about what the author would say rather than what is true, but I'd say the fact you're reading it in the first place means you believe the author has a way of thinking that is new to you and likely valuable, and hence learning to emulate the thinking [and perhaps narrowing down what parts are worth emulating] is exactly what you should do.)
And in Childhoods of exceptional people, the author finds that immersion in boredom was a universal experience:
But this immersion in boredom is also a universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A substantial fraction were completely kept apart from other children, either because their guardians decided so or because they were bedridden with various illnesses during childhood (like Descartes). A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socializing too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test that hypothesis!)
None of this is an airtight argument that solitude is in fact important, but hopefully it at least is intriguing.
It is a correlation and there are good reasons to suspect alternate directions of causation. I'll quote Hollingworth:
THE TENDENCY TO BECOME ISOLATED
Yoder [7] noticed, in studying the boyhood of great men, that although play interests were keen among them, the play was often of a solitary kind. The same is true of children who "test high." The majority of children testing above 160 IQ play little with other children unless special conditions are provided, such as those found in a special class. The difficulties are too great, in the ordinary course of events, in finding playmates who are appropriate in size and congenial in mentality. This fact was noted some years ago by the present writer. Terman [8] in 1930 made a special study of the play of those in his group of children who tested above 170 IQ and found them generally more solitary in work and play than children clustering around 140 IQ.
These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case. These difficulties are illustrated in the efforts of the seven-year-old boy already mentioned. Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as "babies" and adults seldom play during the hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or are even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.
This difficulty of the gifted child in forming friendships is largely a result of the infrequency of persons who are like-minded. The more intelligent a person is, regardless of age, the less often can he find a truly congenial companion. The average child finds playmates in abundance who can think and act on a level congenial to him because there are so many average children.
Adding to the conditions which make for isolation is the fact that gifted children are often "only" children, or they have brothers and sisters who differ widely from them in age. Thus playmates in the home are less numerous for them than for children generally.
The imaginary playmate as a solution of the problem of loneliness is fairly frequent. We know but little at present of the psychology of this invention of the unreal to fill real needs. Reasoning from the general principles of mental hygiene, one would say that the pattern of companionship represented in the imaginary playmate is less valuable for personal development than a pattern founded on reality, and that effort should be made to fill the real need with genuine persons, if possible.
Also, the deep interest in reading which typifies the gifted child may further his isolation. Irwin believes that reading should be deferred in the education of the highly intelligent. "I believe it is especially important that intellectual children get a grasp on reality through real experiences in making and doing things before they are ever introduced to the wonders that lie within books." From this point of view, the development of the physical, social, and emotional aspects of personality would have first attention in the education of a gifted child, the intellectual being fostered last of all because it comes of itself and is too likely to run away with the other three and lead to isolation.
This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 IQ find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ. At the extremely high levels of 180 and 190 IQ, the problem of friendships is difficult indeed, and the younger the person, the more difficult it is. The trouble decreases with age because as persons become adult, they naturally seek and find on their own initiative groups who are like-minded, such as learned societies.
The anecdote of the 7-year-old comes in the previous section, also worth reading:
LEARNING TO "SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY"
A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment, and misanthropy.
This point may be illustrated by the behavior of a seven-year-old boy with an IQ of 178. He was not sent to school until the age of seven because of his advanced interest in reading. At seven, however, the compulsory attendance law took effect and the child was placed in the third grade at school. After about four weeks of attendance, he came home from school weeping bitterly. "Oh Grandmother, Grand-mother," he cried, "they don't know what's good! They just won't read!"
The fact came to light that he had taken book after book to school—all his favorites from his grandfather's library—and had tried to show the other third-grade pupils what treasures these were, but the boys and girls only resisted his efforts, made fun of him, threw the treasures on the floor, and finally pulled his hair.
Such struggles as these, if they continue without directing the child's insight, may lead to complete alienation from his contemporaries in childhood, and to misanthropy in adolescence and adulthood. Particularly deplorable are the struggles of these children against dull or otherwise unworthy adults in authority. The very gifted child or adolescent, perceiving the illogical conduct of those in charge of his affairs, may turn rebellious against all authority and fall into a condition of negative suggestibility—a most unfortunate trend of personality, since the person is then unable to take a coöperative attitude toward authority.
A person who is highly suggestible in a negative direction is as much in bondage to others around him as is the person who is positively suggestible. The social value of the person is seriously impaired in either case. The gifted are not likely to fall victims to positive suggestion but many of them develop negativism to a conspicuous degree.
The highly intelligent child will be intellectually capable of self-determination, and his greatest value to society can be realized only if he is truly self-possessed and detached from the influences of both positive and negative suggestion. The more intelligent the child, the truer this statement is. It is especially unfortunate, therefore, that so many gifted children have in authority over them persons of no special fitness for the task, who cannot gain or keep the respect of these good thinkers. Such unworthy guardians arouse, by the process of "redintegration," contempt for authority wherever it is found, and the inability to yield gracefully to command.
Thus some gifted persons, mishandled in youth, become contentious, aggressive, and stubborn to an extent which renders them difficult and disagreeable in all human relationships involving subordination. Since subordination must precede posts of command in the ordinary course of life, this is an unfortunate trend of personality. Cynicism and negativism are likely to interfere seriously with a life career. Happily, gifted children are typically endowed with a keen sense of humor, and are apparently able to mature beyond cynicism eventually in a majority of cases.
(I wonder what percentage of Less Wrongers see themselves in the above passages)
So. It seems to me that this social isolation (in the sense of failure to make friends) is not a good thing; like accidentally exploding things in chemistry experiments as a teenager, it correlates with great ability or potential, but in itself, it is probably a negative thing.
It's possible that deliberately engineering the above situation in youth is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. There are probably some geniuses for whom failure to make friends ended up causing, perhaps even motivating, them to spend all their time thinking or tinkering and thereby making great discoveries. But there are others for whom failure to make friends meant they didn't understand other people, weren't motivated to help them, and therefore didn't create startups to solve their problems, and instead retreated from the world: into games, fantasy, alcohol, drugs, or what have you. I'm skeptical that it has positive expected value, even if you had a completely ruthless, Ender's Game style attitude of "All I care about is the likelihood that they'll become a world-shaking genius; if I increase that by 1% in exchange for turning the median case from 'moderately successful professional' to 'homeless drug addict', that's worth it".
All that said, voluntarily entering temporary periods of isolation as an adult (knowing one can come back anytime) is very different from being involuntarily isolated since early childhood. The former is a perfectly fine thing to try, and quite plausibly good for the reasons described in this post. The latter I would strongly disrecommend.
What is solitude?
I have thoughts about "loneliness", a related concept:
- There are many kinds of social interaction that you can want, need, or benefit from. (If we need to distinguish a "want" from a "need", I'd say a "need" is something that causes more negative effects than simple frustration if it's not satisfied.)
- Interaction types that probably register as a "need" to at least some people: seeing human faces; having fun with friends; discussing your problems with someone; intellectual stimulation; sexual and romantic activities; probably more.
- I'm sure there is wide individual variation on how much people need these things.
- Interaction types that probably register as a "need" to at least some people: seeing human faces; having fun with friends; discussing your problems with someone; intellectual stimulation; sexual and romantic activities; probably more.
- "Loneliness" is when there's at least one type of interaction that you're getting less of than you need.
- It follows that you can be lonely despite spending hours a day surrounded by people, if those people aren't giving you the type of interaction you need. (I came up with this definition to explain precisely this situation.)
"Solitude" naively means being physically alone; related to "solitary". If you want a more sophisticated definition, then in the above context I would say it means the state where there is some interaction type the person isn't getting. "Solitude" also carries a nonnegative and maybe-positive connotation, implying that the person didn't need the interaction, or possibly that leaving the need unsatisfied brings benefits that exceed the negatives.
It seems like you, or at least Cal Newport, are picking a subset of the above list of social interactions and declaring that to be what "solitude" refers to. I am inclined to frown upon this, and recommend picking a more specific term, like "intellectual solitude". Like, for each of them, you could imagine cases in which it's good to self-isolate at least temporarily, but I think the benefits, the reasons for the benefits, and the situations in which they're net beneficial are pretty different for e.g. romantic solitude vs "seeing human faces" solitude vs "solving my own problems" solitude vs "coming up with my own intellectual ideas and research directions" solitude vs "feeling secure and happy by myself" solitude; the cases may rhyme somewhat with each other, and that may be worth noting, but most of the discussion should be about the specific kinds of solitude.
Just because the average person disapproves of a protest tactic doesn't mean that the tactic doesn’t work. Roger Hallam's "Designing the Revolution" series outlines the thought process underlying disruptive actions like the infamous soup-throwing protests. Reasonable people may disagree (I disagree with quite a few things he says), but if you don't know the arguments, any objection is going to miss the point. To be clear, PauseAI does not endorse or engage in disruptive civil disobedience, but I discuss it here to illustrate some broader points. Anyways, “Designing the Revolution” is very long, so here's a tl/dr:
- If the public response is: "I'm all for the cause those protestors are advocating, but I can't stand their methods"...notice that the first half of this statement was approval of the only thing that matters—approval of the cause itself.
But that approval may have predated the protest, and might have been reduced by it. Have you encountered this research? "Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements". Abstract:
Social movements are critical agents of change that vary greatly in both tactics and popular support. Prior work shows that extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement. Though this effect obtained in tests of popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests (Studies 1-3), we found that self-identified political activists were willing to use extreme tactics because they believed them to be effective for recruiting popular support (Studies 4a & 4b). The activist’s dilemma – wherein tactics that raise awareness also tend to reduce popular support – highlights a key challenge faced by social movements struggling to affect progressive change.
Excerpt:
Study 1. Participants read about a fictional animal rights activist group called Free the Vulnerable (FTV). The extremity of the movement’s protest behavior was manipulated at three levels: Moderate Protest, Extreme Protest, or Highly Extreme Protest conditions. The protesters in the two extreme protest conditions engaged in unlawful activities (e.g., breaking into an animal testing facility) modeled after protest activities of real-life activists, while the activists in the Moderate Protest condition peacefully marched in protest. [...] After participants read their assigned article, they completed measures of perceived extremity, social identification with the movement and support for it.
Important results: Social identification with the movement was 2.70, 2.48, 2.28 for moderate, extreme, and highly extreme protest conditions respectively. Support for the movement: 3.07, 2.60, 2.62.
Read more of the paper to see more similar results. It is nice to see them. For example, in the study with fictional BLM protests:
These results suggest that both African Americans and non-African Americans perceived protesters as more extreme and felt less support for them in the Extreme Protest condition.
[...] Thus, as with participant race, these results suggest that participants, regardless of their political ideology, reacted negatively to extreme protests.
And the study with fictional anti-Trump protests:
Together, these results suggest that regardless of pre-existing attitudes regarding Trump’s candidacy, participants in the Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters as more extreme and reported less support for the movement.
I would also comment that, if the environment was so chaotic that roughly everything important to life could not be modeled—if general-purpose modeling ability was basically useless—then life would not have evolved that ability, and "intelligent life" probably wouldn't exist.
You have a point, although I don't think having a genuine feeling of despair is a hugely important variable. As the story goes:
[Method actor Dustin] Hoffman had a grueling scene coming up, where his character hadn’t slept in three days, and Hoffman told [Sir Laurence] Olivier that to prepare for the scene, he too hadn’t slept for 72 hours.
“My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”
But more generally, even if you want to teach some kind of set of skills and resilience for dealing with things like "sitting still for hours a day", "doing hours of boring homework-like stuff", "obeying lots of orders from authority figures", etc., you can deliberately learn and practice each of them, and ramp up the difficulty more quickly, and probably reach a higher level in 8 months than most people reach in 12 years. U.S. Army boot camp is apparently 10 weeks, for example.
Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.
If one does accept the premise that feigning enthusiasm is a useful skill, that's still not a good justification of formal education as it exists: it certainly doesn't take 12 years of grade school to teach that skill.
Epistemic status: this is an attempt to steelman the case for the death penalty
...
I do not believe in vengeance or justice. I do however believe in fixing problems. And it's clear the only way to fix this problem is to put such people in positions where they cannot do anyone any harm.
Some people have complained that, when their opponents "steelman" their position, in practice it can mean they steelman a particular argument that is not their main argument. This struck me as a remarkably explicit and self-aware example of that.
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe tell people not to use "steelmanning" in such cases, maybe tell people to stop expecting "steelmanning" to necessarily mean it won't miss a central argument. Maybe decide that you should, e.g., say "I'm steelmanning this particular argument", because if you say "I'm steelmanning the case for this conclusion" then that means you're supposed to capture all important arguments for that conclusion.
I personally recommend that all parents donate to the Localdeity Enrichment Fund, an important yet frequently overlooked cause area.
Whoever wrote that article is confused, since in the table in the section labeled "Analogy vs Simile: The Differences" they have several entries the wrong way around (compared to the two paragraphs preceding it).
It seems to me that you could use the same comparison for either an analogy or a simile. An analogy would usually be in the present tense, "X is like Y", and followed by more explanation of the concept the analogy is meant to illustrate. A simile would more frequently be in the past tense as part of a narrative, and more frequently use other verbs than "is"—"X moved like a Y"—and probably wouldn't extend beyond the current sentence, usually not even beyond that phrase. I think a bare statement of "X is like Y" might go either way.
The term "privilege" is bad here; prefer "advantage". "Privilege"—privi-lege, private law—implies that there's an authority deciding to grant it to some people and not others, which would be unjust (since most things that affect intelligence, such as genetics and childhood nutrition, happen long before a person does anything to "deserve" it more than others), which in turn encourages people to get angry and suspicious, and encourages the advantaged to feel embarrassed or even guilty by association when they've done nothing wrong. Calling it "privilege" is only useful if you want to encourage that kind of conflict.
That said, there are plenty of people who downplay the importance of intelligence, and/or exaggerate the degree to which it can be improved through hard work, educational interventions, school funding, etc. However, those people are much more likely to be social justice activists than rationalists. The #3 top voted post in the 2023 Less Wrong review was about how to use genetic technology to improve intelligence (and other qualities) in the general population. It's interesting to note that the 2023 post is trying to fix the problem of people not being as smart as they would like to be, while this post's recommendations do not include trying to fix that problem.
Other reasons:
Biases towards claiming agreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely trusted, respected, high status, etc., as well as powerful, then if Alice convinces you that the institution supports her beliefs, then you might be inclined to give more credence to Alice's beliefs. That would serve Alice's political agenda.
Weaker biases towards claiming disagreement with one’s own beliefs
If the institution is widely hated—for example al-Qaeda, the CIA, the KGB—or considered low status, crazy, and so on, then if Alice convinces you that the institution opposes her beliefs, that might make you more sympathetic to her, make you distrust arguments against her beliefs, and/or defuse preexisting arguments that support for Alice's position comes mostly from these evil/crazy institutions.
In Judaism, you're not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I've heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious.
In any case, googling for "grief and genetic closeness study" yields this:
A Twin Loss Survey was completed by MZ and same-sex DZ twins following loss of a cotwin and nontwin relatives. Twin survivors (N = 612; MZ = 506; DZ, n = 106) included twins whose age at loss was 15 years or older. Participation age was M = 47.66 years (SD = 15.31). Hamilton's inclusive fitness theory generated two hypotheses: (1) MZ twins will recall greater grief intensity at loss than DZ twins; (2) loss of a twin will receive greater grief intensity ratings than loss of nontwin relatives. [...] Part I: Hypotheses regarding grief intensity were supported.
And this, where the highlights are:
- Surviving MZ twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than surviving DZ twins.
- Female twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than male twins.
- Twins grieve more intensely for deceased co-twins than for other deceased relatives.
- Survivors' grief intensity varies with genetic relatedness to the deceased.
Everything you say seems straightforwardly correct or a logical guess. I'd add:
- I expect identical twin sisters do feel closer to their nieces than non-identical sisters feel to their nieces. There would probably be a higher degree of discovering that this person just happens to have traits like your own.
- Even from a fully logical "optimize my inclusive genetic fitness" perspective, there is value, all else being equal, in most parent-child relationships that isn't in most aunt-niece relationships. Because you raised this child, she probably trusts you, you know her strengths and weaknesses and where she needs help, etc.; you have a comparative advantage at helping your daughter vs helping your niece. (I speak of good parental relationships; of course, there are some where the parent has a comparative disadvantage. Also, if you know your child is a no-good criminal or something, and you know nothing about your identical sister's child, then the latter may be a better bet for investing your resources; hence my saying "all else being equal".)
I think there's at least decent truth to it. One study:
This study examines gift giving at Israeli weddings. In accordance with kin selection theory, we hypothesized that wedding guests possessing greater genetic relatedness to the newlyweds would offer greater sums of money as wedding gifts. We also hypothesized that family members stemming from the maternal side (where the genetic lineage has higher kinship certainty) would offer the newlyweds more money than those stemming from the paternal side. Data on the monetary gift sums of the wedding guests from 30 weddings were collapsed according to two criteria: (a) genetic relatedness (0%, 6.25%, 12.5%, 25%, and 50%) and (b) kinship certainty (maternal or paternal lineage). Both hypotheses were supported.
I think I had also heard of studies that looked into either "how devastated would you feel", or "how devastated did you feel", regarding the death of a family member, and that these also fit the "genetic closeness" predictions. I don't know exactly how they were done—obviously genetic closeness will correlate highly with family structure that gives you actual closeness, and one must control for that. But my impression is that the effect is real and significant, though of course not all-consuming.
There's also an interview with someone who studied identical twins a lot, with various interesting things to say.
I think the hemisphere stuff is quite literal. I think it's general knowledge that the right eye feeds into the left side of the brain, and vice versa (Actually, looking it up, it is the case that the left is controlled by the right and vice versa, but I see some claims that the information feeds into both sides, in a nearly balanced manner[1]; but I don't know if Ziz knows that); and Ziz's whole "unihemispheric sleep" thing tells you to keep one eye closed and distract the other eye so that eventually one hemisphere falls asleep.
- ^
Claude sez: "When nerve fibers cross at the optic chiasm, approximately 53-55% of nerve fibers cross to the opposite hemisphere, while 45-47% remain on the same side. This means that each hemisphere receives slightly different proportions of visual information from both eyes." Wiki on Optic chiasm confirms: "The number of axons that do not cross the midline and project ipsilaterally depends on the degree of binocular vision of the animal (3% in mice and 45% in humans do not cross)".
BTW, on Ziz's obituary someone wrote:
Like Jesus, he will arise from the dead.
not sure if sincere or trolling...
The date on that comment is Jan 30 2025. Methinks 90% likelihood it's causally downstream from the recent murders and that the poster knows Ziz was never dead.
If you would use genetic studies to guide clinical trial representation for a drug to combat heart disease you would look at the genes associated with heart disease and see that mutations in those genes are evenly distributed in your clinical trial representation. You would not focus on the race with which people self-identify.
I asked Claude a few questions. I'll just give snippets of the answers:
- Are there scenarios where doctors recommend different doses of a medication, or other variations in a medical plan, based on a patient's race?
- Yes. "For instance, some Asian populations metabolize certain antidepressants and antipsychotics differently, requiring adjusted dosages"; "African American patients often respond differently to certain blood pressure medications. Guidelines recommend specific first-line treatments like calcium channel blockers for this population."
- In these scenarios, have people found out the relevant genes that make the difference?
- Yes in some cases. "CYP2D6 gene: Affects metabolism of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and pain medications. Variations are more common in certain ethnic groups"; "HLA-B*1502 gene: Associated with severe skin reactions to carbamazepine in Asian populations, particularly those of Han Chinese descent."
- Are there cases where doctors adjust the treatment plan by race but don't yet know which genes are relevant?
- Yes. "Kidney Disease: African Americans show different progression and treatment responses compared to other racial groups, with ongoing research to identify genetic factors"; "Differences in heart disease risk and medication response across racial groups are recognized, with some genetic pathways identified but not fully mapped."
So. If you do know what genes make the difference, then of course that's the best type of information to work with. But, particularly for polygenic effects, it may be that you have information about the relevance of race without knowing the genes in question. In that scenario, either you use the race information or you use nothing, and the former seems the better choice (though, yes, to the extent that "self-identification" means that someone would say "I'm X" instead of "I'm half-X and half-Y", that makes the information lower-quality).
@Friendly Monkey , I'm replying to your reaction:
There are people who require multiple methods of persuasion before they act in the way you want. One category is decisionmakers for an organization, who have actually been persuaded by intimidation, but they can't just say that, because they would look weak and possibly as though they're defecting against the organization or its aims, so they need to sell it as some high-minded decision they've come to of their own accord. Or it could be the reverse: decisionmakers who are persuaded by your ideological arguments, but are funded / otherwise kept in charge by those who don't care or have contempt for the ideology, so they need to sell it to their funders (presumably in private) as, "Hey, look, let's be realistic here, if we do this then they'll do that and we absolutely can't afford that. But if we do this other thing, that won't happen, and would it really be so bad? And we'll tell the public that recent events have made us realize how important [...]".
In both cases, it's essential for you to have someone doing the intimidation and someone publicizing the high-minded arguments, and usually it works best if these are different people. (For example, if an intellectual who is respected by the mainstream (but only agreed with by a minority) starts making threats, that seems likely to lose them mainstream acceptance—such an ugly thing to be involved with, carrying out the threats even more so—and thus, for that reason among others, making the threats credible is more difficult than it would be for a thug who has nothing to lose.)
So, for those decisionmakers, if you have intimidation but not a public-friendly face (a book-publishing intellectual, an organization doing charity events, etc.), you get nothing, and if you have the friendly face but not intimidation, you also get nothing, but if you have both, then you win their support. It's not a matter of "intimidation and friendliness each independently get diminishing marginal returns, and if you over-invest in one or even saturate it then that's inefficient"; rather, you need both to have any success.
Incidentally, although violence was the subject above, I've used "intimidation", which may be interpreted to also cover things like social shaming or threatening to arbitrarily cancel business deals. That makes the above patterns cover a lot of things done in recent years.
Another aspect: Frequently, the group doing the intimidation will claim it's justified. One man's threat of aggressive violence may be another man's statement that he'll act in self-defense or justified punishment, if they have different theories of rights, or perhaps disagreement about what happened.
The more mainstream-friendly group who is on their side... If they want to defend the behavior, then, depending on the circumstances, they have lots of options for their official position: the ideological, "It's justified" or "It's an overreaction but you do have to understand where they're coming from"; the conversation-tactical, "Hey, look over there! Something more important is happening" or "Anyone who complains about this has contemptible traits XYZ and should be attacked"; the associational, "It wasn't our people", or even "It was a false flag"; the evidentiary, "It's not as bad as they claim", occasionally even "It didn't happen"; and so on. (Any of these stances might have been chosen honestly, and might be correct, but, especially for the most sophisticated and the most ideological, one's priors should be skeptical. Sometimes "Bounded Distrust" is applicable; it can be interesting to think through "If they could have taken and defended stance A, they probably would have, so the fact that they picked stance B tells me ...".)
"A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of .
The average distance from the starting point is close to after n random steps (in 1 dimension). But I'd characterize that as a speed of . Or you could say "... looks like a directional movement of distance ".
I expect that's about not trusting the foreigners who did the clinical trials (I have heard this)[1], and not so much about expecting that Americans are biologically different from foreigners.
- ^
Specifically, someone with some knowledge told me that the FDA knows that there are some countries where the trials are completely untrustworthy. And that there was a political decision where they said, "If we disallow trials from some countries but not others, there will be much complaining and we'll probably be called racists", and solved the issue by disallowing trials from all foreign countries.
Let's see what the base rate for murder is. After some googling... Since the "clearance rate" for homicides is 50% (as of a recent year), even if we know there were N murders, it's hard to say how many distinct murderers there were. But some source says it's a small percentage of murderers who kill again, so let's just assume that N murders = N murderers. Both "taking the homicide rate (7.5 per 100k per year in 2022) and multiplying by a lifetime (we'll say 80 years)", and "googling for the percentage of deaths that are caused by homicide", yield roughly 0.6%. So 6 per thousand.
I haven't kept count of the numerator, but if you were going to argue that the murderer rate is no different than among the American general population, the denominator would need to be in the high hundreds at least. (It might also be interesting to control for other demographics of rationalists.)
A better counterargument would be that Ziz's associates just happened to be trans, because that's a shared quality that can be quite important to people in ways that may make them tend to stick together, which is also true of, say, having a shared hobby like Magic: The Gathering. So when Ziz became a murder cult leader, and several associates committed murder, then that shared quality ends up being highly correlated with murder, and this could happen just as easily with any other ...
But that's not quite true. Ziz's writings have talked a lot about trans stuff, and I have the impression (it's been a couple of years since I read the blog, and this might not necessarily be written too explicitly) that Ziz made a point of seeking out trans people or, probably most especially, pre-trans or gender-questioning people. (At least, that was the result; it could have happened for other reasons; but I think there was an optimization process pointing in this direction.) Because someone in that stage, in the process of majorly rethinking their identity and how they relate to the world, possibly experiencing significant gender dysphoria and associated issues... Is probably much more vulnerable than average to a cult leader saying, "I understand people like you, I can tell you all kinds of things (probably many true things!) about our kind, I have this whole philosophy that I've written out, and you should spend lots of time with me as I explain it to you... And by the way the philosophy says the world is mostly evil and we should lose any aversion to violence and also extreme violence is obligatory in certain cases." It is much less plausible that one could do all that with Magic: The Gathering buddies.[1]
So, if this model is correct, that (a) Ziz specifically targeted early-stage trans people and (b) early-stage trans people are especially vulnerable to cult recruitment[2], then the results are less surprising. A compassionate response would be to do something like make a point of warning young trans and maybe-trans people about cult recruitment in general, and perhaps about Ziz specifically (though if most haven't already heard about Ziz, it might be best to keep it that way). I guess a less-compassionate response is to exclude them completely.
- ^
A somewhat similar crop of potential recruits, in terms of psychological vulnerability, would be, well, psychiatric patients. Have there been therapist cults? Oh yes, Dianetics and things derived from it such as Re-evaluation Counseling come to mind. (Was L. Ron Hubbard himself a therapist? He did apparently volunteer at a mental health clinic, but I'm not sure how much professional training he got.)
- ^
Research question: Are there other cases of cults that targeted trans / gender-questioning people? I think I've heard things, but don't have good pointers to find out frequency and severity.
I'd point out that the magnitude of the "exploitation" is the magnitude of the incentive for market players to find the better solution. If Bob is the one guy for whom making him wear a tuxedo isn't worthwhile, and if it's close to worthwhile—e.g. him wearing it produces $4000 of value to the company over the time he wears it—then that's $1000 being left on the table. If there are 100 employees being "exploited" like Bob, for whom making them wear tuxedos is extremely wasteful—say it produces only $100 of value for them to wear tuxedos—then there is $490,000 being left on the table, which may be enough to justify making a new company if the existing one is for some reason stubborn about the issue. (Also, the more employees there are in that situation, the more likely it is that someone will complain and someone else will notice the opportunity.)
Some related scenarios are discussed in my post here, e.g. when popularity ≈ beauty + substance, and if popularity and beauty are readily apparent then you can estimate substance.
There had been a study comparing the effects of moderate protests vs extreme protests, in hypothetical situations (the study participants would e.g. read a fictional article describing the activities of a protest group), and concluded that "Extreme Protest Actions Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements":
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions—protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both—typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movements (e.g., animal rights, anti-Trump, anti-abortion) and extreme protest actions (e.g., blocking highways, vandalizing property). Further, in 5 of 6 studies, negative reactions to extreme protest actions also led participants to support the movement's central cause less, and these effects were largely independent of individuals' prior ideology or views on the issue. In all studies we found effects were driven by diminished social identification with the movement. In Studies 4-6, serial mediation analyses detailed a more in-depth model: observers viewed extreme protest actions to be immoral, reducing observers' emotional connection to the movement and, in turn, reducing identification with and support for the movement. Taken together with prior research showing that extreme protest actions can be effective for applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness of movements, these findings suggest an activist's dilemma, in which the same protest actions that may offer certain benefits are also likely to undermine popular support for social movements.
It could be that moderate protests are useful. It would be an interesting test of a group: whether it's able to consistently avoid extreme behavior.
Smart people are often too arrogant and proud, and know too much.
I thought that might be the case. If you looked at GPT-3 or 3.5, then, the higher the quality of your own work, the less helpful (and, potentially, the more destructive and disruptive) it is to substitute in the LLM's work; so higher IQ in these early years of LLMs may correlate with dismissing them and having little experience using them.
But this is a temporary effect. Those who initially dismissed LLMs will eventually come round; and, among younger people, especially as LLMs get better, higher-IQ people who try LLMs for the first time will find them worthwhile and use them just as much as their peers. And if you have two people who have both spent N hours using the same LLM for the same purposes, higher IQ will help, all else being equal.
Of course, if you're simply reporting a correlation you observe, then all else is likely not equal. Please think about selection effects, such as those described here.
Using LLMs is an intellectual skill. I would be astonished if IQ was not pretty helpful for that.
For editing adults, it is a good point that lots of them might find a personality tweak very useful, and e.g. if it gave them a big bump in motivation, that would likely be worth more than, say, 5-10 IQ points. An adult is in a good position to tell what's the delta between their current personality and what might be ideal for their situation.
Deliberately tweaking personality does raise some "dual use" issues. Is there a set of genes that makes someone very unlikely to leave their abusive cult, or makes them loyal obedient citizens to their tyrannical government, or makes them never join the hated outgroup political party? I would be pretty on board with a norm of not doing research into that. Basic "Are there genes that cause personality disorders that ~everyone agrees are bad?" is fine; "motivation" as one undifferentiated category seems fine; Big 5 traits ... have some known correlations with political alignment, which brings it into territory I'm not very comfortable with, but if it goes no farther that it might be fine.
On a quick skim, an element that seems to be missing is that having emotions which cause you to behave 'irrationally' can in fact be beneficial from a rational perspective.
For example, if everyone knows that, when someone does you a favor, you'll feel obligated to find some way to repay them, and when someone injures you, you'll feel driven to inflict vengeance upon them even at great cost to yourself—if everyone knows this about you, then they'll be more likely to do you favors and less likely to injure you, and your expected payoffs are probably higher than if you were 100% "rational" and everyone knew it. I believe this is in fact why we have the emotions of gratitude and anger, and I think various animals have something resembling them. Put it this way: carrying out threats and promises is "irrational" by definition, but making your brain into a thing that will carry out threats and promises may be very rational.
So you could call these emotions "irrational" or the thoughts they lead to "biased", but I think that (a) likely pushes your thinking in the wrong direction in general, and (b) gives you no guidance on what "irrational" emotions are likely to exist.
What is categorized as "peer pressure" here? Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don't conform? I'm guessing not. But how about implicit threats? What if you've heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don't conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined? In any situation that you could call "peer pressure", I imagine there's always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion.
The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be "Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?" and "Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?". Which don't necessarily have the same answer. It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be "conformist" are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
The thing that comes to mind, when I think of "formidable master of rationality", is a highly experienced engineer trying to debug problems, especially high-urgency problems that the normal customer support teams haven't been able to handle. You have a fresh phenomenon, which the creators of the existing product apparently didn't anticipate (or if they did, they didn't think it worth adding functionality to handle it), which casts doubt on existing diagnostic systems. You have priors on which tools are likely to still work, priors on which underlying problems are likely to cause which symptoms; tests you can try, each of which has its own cost and range of likely outcomes, and some of which you might invent on the spot; all of these lead to updating your probability distribution over what the underlying problem might be.
Medical diagnostics, as illustrated by Dr. House, can be similar, although I suspect the frequency of "inventing new tests to diagnose a never-before-seen problem" is lower there.
One argument I've encountered is that sentient creatures are precisely those creatures that we can form cooperative agreements with. (Counter-argument: one might think that e.g. the relationship with a pet is also a cooperative one [perhaps more obviously if you train them to do something important, and you feed them], while also thinking that pets aren't sentient.)
Another is that some people's approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma is to decide "Anyone who's sufficiently similar to me can be expected to make the same choice as me, and it's best for all of us if we cooperate, so I'll cooperate when encountering them"; and some of them may figure that sentience alone is sufficient similarity.
So, the arithmetic and geometric mean agree when the inputs are equal, and, the more unequal they are, the lower the geometric mean is.
I note that the subtests have ceilings, which puts a limit on how much any one can skew the result. Like, if you have 10 subtests, and the max score is something like 150, then presumably each test has a max score of 15 points. If we imagine someone gets five 7s and five 13s (a moderately unbalanced set of abilities), then the geometric mean is 9.54, while the arithmetic mean is 10. So, even if someone were confused about whether the IQ test was using a geometric or an arithmetic mean, does it make a large difference in practice?
The people you're arguing against, is it actually a crux for them? Do they think IQ tests are totally invalid because they're using an arithmetic mean, but actually they should realize it's more like a geometric mean and then they'd agree IQ tests are great?
1. IQ scores do not measure even close to all cognitive abilities and realistically could never do that.
Well, the original statement was "sums together cognitive abilities" and didn't use the word "all", and I, at least, saw no reason to assume it. If you're going to say something along the lines of "Well, I've tried to have reasonable discussions with these people, but they have these insane views", that seems like a good time to be careful about how you represent those views.
2. Many of the abilities that IQ scores weight highly are practically unimportant.
Are you talking about direct measurement, or what they correlate with? Because, certainly, things like anagramming a word have almost no practical application, but I think it's intended to (and does) correlate with language ability. But in any case, the truth value of the statement that IQ is "an index that sums together cognitive abilities" is unaffected by whether those abilities are useful ones.
Perhaps you have some idea of a holistic view, of which that statement is only a part, and maybe that holistic view contains other statements which are in fact insane, and you're attacking that view, but... in the spirit of this post, I would recommend confining your attacks to specific statements rather than to other claims that you think correlate with those statements.
3. Differential-psychology tests are in practice more like log scales than like linear scales, so "sums" are more like products than like actual suns; even if you are absurdly good at one thing, you're going to have a hard time competing with someone in IQ if they are moderately better at many things.
I wonder how large a difference this makes in practice. So if we run with your claim here, it seems like your conclusion would be... that IQ tests combine the subtest scores in the wrong way, and are less accurate than they should be for people with very uneven abilities? Is that your position? At any rate, even if the numbers are logarithms, it's still correct to say that the test is adding them up, and I don't consider that good grounds for calling it "insane" for people to consider it addition.
thinks of IQ as an index that sums together cognitive abilities
Is this part not technically true? IQ tests tend to have a bunch of subtests intended to measure different cognitive abilities, and you add up—or average, which is adding up and dividing by a constant—your scores on each subtest. For example (bold added):
The current version of the test, the WAIS-IV, which was released in 2008, is composed of 10 core subtests and five supplemental subtests, with the 10 core subtests yielding scaled scores that sum to derive the Full Scale IQ.
Interesting. The natural approach is to imagine that you just have a 3-sided die with 2, 4, 6 on the sides, and if you do that, then I compute A = 12 and B = 6[1]. But, as the top Reddit comment's edit points out, the difference between that problem and the one you posed is that your version heavily weights the probability towards short sequences—that weighting being 1/2^n for a sequence of length n. (Note that the numbers I got, A=12 and B=6, are so much higher than the A≈2.7 and B=3 you get.) It's an interesting selection effect.
The thing is that, if you roll a 6 and then a non-6, in an "A" sequence you're likely to just die due to rolling an odd number before you succeed in getting the double 6, and thus exclude the sequence from the surviving set; whereas in a "B" sequence there's a much higher chance you'll roll a 6 before dying, and thus include this longer "sequence of 3+ rolls" in the set.
To illustrate with an extreme version, consider:
A: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll two 6s in a row, given that you succeed in doing this. You ragequit if it takes more than two rolls.
Obviously that's one way to reduce A to 2.
- ^
Excluding odd rolls completely, so the die has a 1/3 chance of rolling 6 and a 2/3 chance of rolling an even number that's not 6, we have:
A = 1 + 1/3 * A2 + 2/3 * A
Where A2 represents "the expected number of die rolls until you get two 6's in a row, given that the last roll was a 6". Subtraction and multiplication then yields:
A = 3 + A2
And if we consider rolling a die from the A2 state, we get:
A2 = 1 + 1/3 * 0 + 2/3 * A
= 1 + 2/3 * ASubstituting:
A = 3 + 1 + 2/3 * A
=> (subtract)
1/3 * A = 4
=> (multiply)
A = 12For B, a similar approach yields the equations:
B = 1 + 1/3 * B2 + 2/3 * B
B2 = 1 + 1/3 * 0 + 2/3 * B2And the reader may solve for B = 6.
I can also come up with a story where obviously it's cheaper and more effective to disable all of the nuclear weapons than it is to take over the world, so why would the AI do the second thing?
Erm... For preventing nuclear war on the scale of decades... I don't know what you have in mind for how it would disable all the nukes, but a one-off breaking of all the firing mechanisms isn't going to work. They could just repair/replace that once they discovered the problem. You could imagine some more drastic thing like blowing up the conventional explosives on the missiles so as to utterly ruin them, but in a way that doesn't trigger the big chain reaction. But my impression is that, if you have a pile of weapons-grade uranium, then it's reasonably simple to make a bomb out of it, and since uranium is an element, no conventional explosion can eliminate that from the debris. Maybe you can melt it, mix it with other stuff, and make it super-impure?
But even then, the U.S. and Russia probably have stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium. I suspect they could make nukes out of that within a few months. You would have to ruin all the stockpiles too.
And then there's the possibility of mining more uranium and enriching it; I feel like this would take a few years at most, possibly much less if one threw a bunch of resources into rushing it. Would you ruin all uranium mines in the world somehow?
No, it seems to me that the only ways to reliably rule out nuclear war involve either using overwhelming physical force to prevent people from using or making nukes (like a drone army watching all the uranium stockpiles), or being able to reliably persuade the governments of all nuclear powers in the world to disarm and never make any new nukes. The power to do either of these things seems tantamount to the power to take over the world.
why most perfect algorithms that recreate a strawberry on the molecular level destroy the planet as well.
Phrased like this, the answer that comes to mind is "Well, this requires at least a few decades' worth of advances in materials science and nanotechnology and such, plus a lot of expensive equipment that doesn't exist today, and e.g. if you want this to happen with high probability, you need to be sure that civilization isn't wrecked by nuclear war or other threats in upcoming decades, so if you come up with a way of taking over the world that has higher certainty than leaving humanity to its own devices, then that becomes the best plan." Classic instrumental convergence, in other words.
The political version of the question isn't functionally the same as the skin cream version, because the former isn't a randomized intervention—cities that decided to add gun control laws seem likely to have other crime-related events and law changes at the same time, which could produce a spurious result in either direction. So it's quite reasonable to say "My opinion is determined by my priors and the evidence didn't appreciably affect my position."
90% awful idea: "Genetic diversity" in computer programs for resistance to large-scale cyberattacks.
The problem: Once someone has figured out the right security hole in Tesla's software (and, say, broken into a server used to deliver software updates), they can use this to install their malicious code into all 5 million Teslas in the field (or maybe just one model, so perhaps 1 million cars), and probably make them all crash simultaneously and cause a catastrophe.
The solution: There will probably come a point where we can go through the codebase and pick random functions and say, "Claude, write a specification of what this function does", and then "Claude, take this specification and write a new function implementing it", and end up with different functions that accomplish the same task, which are likely to have different bugs. Have every Tesla do this to its own software. Then the virus or program that breaks into some Teslas will likely fail on others.
One reason this is horrible is that you would need an exceptionally high success rate for writing those replacement functions—else this process would introduce lots of mundane bugs, which might well cause crashes of their own. That, or you'd need a very extensive set of unit tests to catch all such bugs—so extensive as to probably eat up most of your engineers' time writing them. Though perhaps AIs could do that part.
To me, that will lead to an environment where people think that they are engaging with criticism without having to really engage with the criticism that actually matters.
This is a possible outcome, especially if the above tactic were the only tactic to be employed. That tactic helps reduce ignorance of the "other side" on the issues that get the steelmanning discussion, and hopefully also pushes away low-curiosity tribalistic partisans while retaining members who value deepening understanding and intellectual integrity. There are lots of different ways for things to go wrong, and any complete strategy probably needs to use lots of tactics. Perhaps the most important tactic would be to notice when things are going wrong (ideally early) and adjust what you're doing, possibly designing new tactics in the process.
Also, in judging a strategy, we should know what resources we assume we have (e.g. "the meetup leader is following the practice we've specified and is willing to follow 'reasonable' requests or suggestions from us"), and know what threats we're modeling. In principle, we might sort the dangers by [impact if it happens] x [probability of it happening], enumerate tactics to handle the top several, do some cost-benefit analysis, decide on some practices, and repeat.
If you frame the criticism as having to be about the mission of psychiatry, it's easy for people to see "Is it ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows?" as off-topic.
My understanding/guess is that "Is it ethical to charge poor patients three-digit fees for no-shows?" is an issue where the psychiatrists know the options and the impacts of the options, and the "likelihood of people actually coming to blows" comes from social signaling things like "If I say I don't charge them, this shows I'm in a comfortable financial position and that I'm compassionate for poor patients"/"If I say I do charge them, this opens me up to accusations (tinged with social justice advocacy) of heartlessness and greed". I would guess that many psychiatrists do charge the fees, but would hate being forced to admit it in public. Anyway, the problem here is not that psychiatrists are unaware of information on the issue, so there'd be little point in doing a steelmanning exercise about it.
That said, as you suggest, it is possible that people would spend their time steelmanning unimportant issues (and making 'criticism' of the "We need fifty Stalins" type). But if we assume that we have one person who notices there's an important unaddressed issue, who has at least decent rapport with the meetup leader, then it seems they could ask for that issue to get steelmanned soon. That could cover it. (If we try to address the scenario where no one notices the unaddressed issue, that's a pretty different problem.)
I want to register high appreciation of Elizabeth for her efforts and intentions described here. <3
The remainder of this post is speculations about solutions. "If one were to try to fix the problem", or perhaps "If one were to try to preempt this problem in a fresh community". I'm agnostic about whether one should try.
Notes on the general problem:
- I suspect lots of our kind of people are not enthusiastic about kicking people out. I think several people have commented, on some cases of seriously bad actors, that it took way too long to actually expel them.
- Therefore, the idea of confronting someone like Jacy and saying "Your arguments are bad, and you seem to be discouraging critical thinking, so we demand you stop it or we'll kick you out" seems like a non-starter in a few ways.
- I guess one could have lighter policing of the form "When you do somewhat-bad things like that, someone will criticize you for it." Sort of like Elizabeth arguing against Jacy. In theory, if one threw enough resources at this, one could create an environment where Jacy-types faced consistent mild pushback, which might work to get them to either reform or leave. However, I think this would take a lot more of the required resources (time, emotional effort) than the right people are inclined to give.
- Those who enjoy winning internet fights... Might be more likely to be Jacy-types in the first place. The intersection of "happy to spend lots of time policing others' behavior" and "not having what seem like more important things to work on" and "embodies the principles we hope to uphold" might be pretty small. The example that comes to mind is Reddit moderators, who have a reputation for being power-trippers. If the position is unpaid, then it seems logical to expect that result. So I conclude that, to a first approximation, good moderators must be paid.
- Could LLMs help with this today? (Obviously this would work specifically for online written stuff, not in-person.) Identifying bad comments is one possibility; helping write the criticism is another.
- Beyond that, one could have "passive" practices, things that everyone was in the habit of doing, which would tend to annoy the bad actors while being neutral (or, hopefully, positive) to the good actors.
- (I've heard that the human immune system, in certain circumstances, does basically that: search for antibodies that (a) bind to the bad things and (b) don't bind to your own healthy cells. Of course, one could say that this is obviously the only sensible thing to do.)
Reading the transcript, my brain generated the idea of having a norm that pushes people to do exercises of the form "Keep your emotions in check as you enumerate the reasons against your favored position, or poke holes in naive arguments for your favored position" (and possibly alternate with arguing for your side, just for balance). In this case, it would be "If you're advocating that everyone do a thing always, then enumerate exceptions to it".
Fleshing it out a bit more... If a group has an explicit mission, then it seems like one could periodically have a session where everyone "steelmans" the case against the mission. People sit in a circle, raising their hands (or just speaking up) and volunteering counterarguments, as one person types them down into a document being projected onto a big screen. If someone makes a mockery of a counterargument ("We shouldn't do this because we enjoy torturing the innocent/are really dumb/subscribe to logical fallacy Y"), then other people gain status by correcting them ("Actually, those who say X more realistically justify it by ..."): this demonstrates their intelligence, knowledge, and moral and epistemic strength. Same thing when someone submits a good counterargument: they gain status ("Ooh, that's a good one") because it demonstrates those same qualities.
Do this for at least five minutes. After that, pause, and then let people formulate the argument for the mission and attack the counterarguments.
Issues in transcript labeling (I'm curious how much of it was done by machine):
- After 00:07:55, a line is unattributed to either speaker; looks like it should be Timothy.
- 00:09:43 is attributed to Timothy but I think must be Elizabeth.
- Then the next line is unattributed (should be Timothy).
- After 00:14:00, unattributed (should be Timothy).
- After 00:23:38, unattributed (should be Timothy)
- After 00:32:34, unattributed (probably Elizabeth)
Grammatically, the most obvious interpretation is a universal quantification (i.e. "All men are taller than all women"), which I think is a major reason why such statements so often lead to objections of "But here's an exception!" Maybe you can tell the audience that they should figure out when to mentally insert "... on average" or "tend to be". Though there are also circumstances where one might validly believe that the speaker really means all. I think it's best to put such qualified language into your statements from the start.
Are you not familiar with the term "vacuously true"? I find this very surprising. People who study math tend to make jokes with it.
The idea is that, if we were to render a statement like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" into formal logic, we'd probably take it to mean the universal statement "For all X such that X is a colorless green idea, X sleeps furiously". A universal statement is logically equivalent to "There don't exist any counterexamples", i.e. "There does not exist X such that X is a colorless green idea and X does not sleep furiously". Which is clearly true, and therefore the universal is equally true.
There is, of course, some ambiguity when rendering English into formal logic. It's not rare for English speakers to say "if" when they mean "if and only if", or "or" when they mean "exclusive or". (And sometimes "Tell me which one", as in "Did you do A, or B?" "Yes." "Goddammit.") Often this doesn't cause problems, but sometimes it does. (In which case, as I've said, the solution is not to give their statement an ambiguous truth value, but rather to ask them to restate it less ambiguously.)
"Dragons are attacking Paris" seems most naturally interpreted as the definite statement "There's some unspecified number—but since I used the plural, it's at least 2—of dragons that are attacking Paris", which would be false. One could also imagine interpreting it as a universal statement "All dragons are currently attacking Paris", which, as you say, would be vacuously true since there are no dragons. However, in English, the preferred way to say that would be "Dragons attack Paris", as CBiddulph says. "Dragons are attacking Paris" uses the present progressive tense, while "Dragons attack Paris" uses what is called the "simple present"/"present indefinite" tense. Wiki says:
The simple present is used to refer to an action or event that takes place habitually, to remark habits, facts and general realities, repeated actions or unchanging situations, emotions, and wishes.[3] Such uses are often accompanied by frequency adverbs and adverbial phrases such as always, sometimes, often, usually, from time to time, rarely, and never.
Examples:
- I always take a shower.
- I never go to the cinema.
- I walk to the pool.
- He writes for a living.
- She understands English.
This contrasts with the present progressive (present continuous), which is used to refer to something taking place at the present moment: I am walking now; He is writing a letter at the moment.
English grammar rules aren't necessarily universal and unchanging, but they do give at least medium-strength priors on how to interpret a sentence.
to the point where you can't really eliminate the context-dependence and vagueness via taboo (because the new words you use will still be somewhat context-dependent and vague)
You don't need to "eliminate" the vagueness, just reduce it enough that it isn't affecting any important decisions. (And context-dependence isn't necessarily a problem if you establish the context with your interlocutor.) I think this is generally achievable, and have cited the Eggplant essay on this. And if it is generally achievable, then:
Richard is arguing against foundational pictures which assume these problems away, and in favor of foundational pictures which recognize them.
I think you should handle the problems separately. In which case, when reasoning about truth, you should indeed assume away communication difficulties. If our communication technology was so bad that 30% of our words got dropped from every message, the solution would not be to change our concept of meanings; the solution would be to get better at error correction, ideally at a lower level, but if necessary by repeating ourselves and asking for clarification a lot.
Elsewhere there's discussion of concepts themselves being ambiguous. That is a deeper issue. But I think it's fundamentally resolved in the same way: always be alert for the possibility that the concept you're using is the wrong one, is incoherent or inapplicable to the current situation; and when it is, take corrective action, and then proceed with reasoning about truth. Be like a digital circuit, where at each stage your confidence in the applicability of a concept is either >90% or <10%, and if you encounter anything in between, then you pause and figure out a better concept, or find another path in which this ambiguity is irrelevant.
Presumably anything which is above 50% eggplant is rounded to 100%, and anything below is rounded to 0%.
No, it's more like what you encounter in digital circuitry. Anything above 90% eggplant is rounded to 100%, anything below 10% eggplant is rounded to 0%, and anything between 10% and 90% is unexpected, out of spec, and triggers a "Wait, what?" and the sort of rethinking I've outlined above, which should dissolve the question of "Is it really eggplant?" in favor of "Is it food my roommate is likely to eat?" or whatever new question my underlying purpose suggests, which generally will register as >90% or <10%.
And you appear to be saying in 99% of cases, the vagueness isn't close to 50% anyway, but closer to 99% or 1%. That may be the case of eggplants, or many nouns (though not all), but certainly not for many adjectives, like "large" or "wet" or "dusty". (Or "red", "rational", "risky" etc.)
Do note that the difficulty around vagueness isn't whether objects in general vary on a particular dimension in a continuous way; rather, it's whether the objects I'm encountering in practice, and needing to judge on that dimension, yield a bunch of values that are close enough to my cutoff point that it's difficult for me to decide. Are my clothes dry enough to put away? I don't need to concern myself with whether they're "dry" in an abstract general sense. (If I had to communicate with others about it, "dry" = "I touch them and don't feel any moisture"; "sufficiently dry" = "I would put them away".)
And, in practice, people often engineer things such that there's a big margin of error and there usually aren't any difficult decisions to make whose impact is important. One may pick one's decision point of "dry enough" to be significantly drier than it "needs" to be, because erring in that direction is less of a problem than the opposite (so that, when I encounter cases in the range of 40-60% "dry enough", either answer is fine and therefore I pick at random / based on my mood or whatever); and one might follow practices like always leaving clothes hanging up overnight or putting them on a dryer setting that's reliably more than long enough, so that by the time one checks them, they're pretty much always on the "dry" side of even that conservative boundary.
Occasionally, the decision is difficult, and the impact matters. That situation sucks, for humans and machines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass#Buridan's_principle
Which is why we tend to engineer things to avoid that.
The edges of perhaps most real-world concepts are vague, but there are lots of central cases where the item clearly fits into the concept, on the dimensions that matter. Probably 99% of the time, when my roommate goes and buys a fruit or vegetable, I am not confounded by it not belonging to a known species, or by it being half rotten or having its insides replaced or being several fruits stitched together. The eggplant may be unusually large, or wet, or dusty, or bruised, perhaps more than I realized an eggplant could be. But, for many purposes, I don't care about most of those dimensions.
Thus, 99% of the time I can glance into the kitchen and make a "known unknown" type of update on the type of fruit-object there or lack thereof; and 1% of the time I see something bizarre, discard my original model, and pick a new question and make a different type of update on that.
I don't think you mentioned "nootropic drugs" (unless "signaling molecules" is meant to cover that, though it seems more specific). I don't think there's anything known to give a significant enhancement beyond alertness, but in a list of speculative technologies I think it belongs.
I would be surprised if grocery stores sold edge cases... But perhaps it was a farmer's market or something, perhaps a seller who often liked to sell weird things, perhaps grew hybridized plants. I'll take the case where it's a fresh vegetable/fruit/whatever thing that looks kind of eggplant-ish.
Anyway, that would generally be determined by: Why do I care whether he bought an eggplant? If I just want to make sure he has food, then that thing looks like it counts and that's good enough for me. If I was going to make a recipe that called for eggplant, and he was supposed to buy one for me, then I'd want to know if its flesh, its taste, etc., were similar enough to an eggplant to work with the recipe (and depending on how picky the target audience was). If I were studying plants for its own sake, I might want to interrogate him about its genetics (or the contact info of the seller if he didn't know). If I wanted to be able to tell someone else what it was, then... default description is "it's an edge case of an eggplant", and ideally I'd be able to call it a "half-eggplant, half-X" and know what X was; and how much I care about that information is determined by the context.
I think, in all of these cases, I would decide "Well, it's kind of an eggplant and kind of not", and lose interest in the question of whether I would call it an "eggplant" (except in that last case, though personally I'm with Feynman's dad on not caring too much about the official name of such things) in favor of the underlying question that I cared about. My initial idea, that there would be either a classical eggplant or nothing in the kitchen, turned out to be incoherent in the face of reality, and I dropped the idea in favor of some new approximation to reality that was true and was relevant to my purpose.
What do you know, there's an Eliezer essay on "dissolving the question". Though working through an example is done in another post (on the question "If a tree falls in a forest...?").